Forrest Gump was screened for the first time in Los Angeles on June 23rd thirty years ago, and upon its release at the cinema a few weeks later it soon obtained enormous approval from the public and critics, for its ability to convincingly alternate comic moments and of drama. It was the highest-grossing film of 1994, and the one for which Tom Hanks – who the following year would win his second consecutive Oscar for best leading actor – is still best remembered.
It was directed by Robert Zemeckis, the director of Back to the Future, who at the time had already acquired an almost mythical status in the Hollywood industry, rivaling his master and colleague Steven Spielberg in terms of fame and ability to convince producers to finance his projects. According to many critics, however, the real strength of the film was the screenplay: it was written by Eric Roth, who drew on important moments in American history – the meetings with Elvis Presley and John Fitzgerald Kennedy, ping-pong diplomacy, Watergate, racial segregation – and managed to include them in a light and engaging narrative, rendering Forrest Gump a smooth and pleasant film to watch despite its potentially demanding duration (142 minutes).
The film also relaunched the career of Winston Groom, the author who 8 years earlier had written the novel of the same name that Zemeckis and Roth had taken inspiration from to create Forrest Gump. In 1995 Groom attempted to capitalize on the film’s success with the release of Gump & Co.the literary sequel to Forrest Gump. Roth read the book and, although he only appreciated some parts of it, he decided to use it as a basis for writing the screenplay for a hypothetical sequel to Forrest Gump. He began writing it in 1995, but due to his commitments on other films he was only able to finish it six years later.
– Read also: Have you ever seen a movie like Forrest Gump?
By the late summer of 2001, Roth and Zemeckis had the script in hand and were convinced they could make the film. The situation seemed very favorable: no producer would have refused to finance the sequel of such a beloved and cult film, and Zemeckis and Roth were profiles capable of offering the right guarantees to create something worthy of the first Forrest Gump. But in the end they had to shelve the project due to a very unfavorable timing coincidence.
In fact, Roth delivered the script to the production company Paramount Pictures on September 10, the day before the terrorist attacks against the Twin Towers in New York which led to the death of 2,996 people and the wounding of another six thousand. Roth has said in several interviews that at that moment he and Zemeckis realized that the film would never be made.
This is because, in a certain sense, Forrest Gump 2 it was rendered obsolete by the developments of that event. Roth wanted to make a fun and optimistic film, a bit like the first, but 9/11 profoundly changed Western common sense. In the following days, in fact, the response to the attacks by the US government was entirely focused on the so-called “war on terror”, and therefore on the idea that, to defend the United States, it was not sufficient to punish the authors of the worst terrorist attack in the world. American history, but also that it was necessary to act resolutely to eliminate any other possible threat from the outside.
In this climate of fear and profound uncertainty, Roth thought that a film like Forrest Gump 2 it had no reason to exist: he explained it in an interview given to the cinema magazine SlashFilmin which he said that after 9/11 the script now seemed irrelevant to him and unsuitable for “a world that has changed.”
Roth also talked about the opening scene he had in mind for Forrest Gump 2: it was supposed to be a continuation of the ending of the first film, with Gump sitting on the bench waiting for his son, Forrest Gump Jr., to return from school. He also mentioned some plot details, such as the fact that his son had the HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, the disease that in Forrest Gump causes the death of his co-star, Jenny Curran (played by Robin Wright).
Furthermore, according to what Roth revealed, the sequel should have included moments similar to those that made the first film famous, such as Gump’s tendency to become the protagonist of several crucial moments for the political and cultural history of the America of the second half of the twentieth century.
Interviewed by film journalist Kevin Polowy, Roth revealed some of these moments. He said, for example, that the film should have contained references to the life of former American football player OJ Simpson and to the Oklahoma City bombing of April 19, 1995, in which Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, two American terrorists, blew up into the air a federal building to hit the US government, killing 168 people.
In Roth’s idea, Gump was supposed to meet by chance a teacher of Native American origin on a public transport bus in Oklahoma City, who would die shortly after in the explosion of the federal building where her kindergarten was located. The reference to OJ Simpson should have instead been a comedic revival of the famous 1994 car chase.
Talk of the possibility of making the film returned in 2007, when Roth had a series of contacts with Paramount to evaluate the feasibility of the project: in the end, however, nothing came of it. According to Roth, choosing not to make the film was the right choice, because “some things should be left as they are”.
In 2022, interviewed in an episode of the podcast Happy Sad Confused, Hanks said that when Zemeckis and Roth approached him about playing Gump in the sequel, he initially considered the idea, but soon turned down the offer. “One smart thing I did was I never signed a contract that stipulated a contractual obligation for a sequel,” said Hanks, according to whom in most cases operations of this type do nothing but ruin successful films and characters and loved by the public.
